Nextjournal / Sep 04 2019
by David Schmudde

Horizon 2020 SME instrument phase 2 (SME-2)

I. Cover Page

  • Title of proposal

  • Acronym of proposal

  • List of participants

  • Fill in the table (use the same participant number as the one used in the administrative proposal forms)

II. Executive Summary (1-page maxium)

III. Content

  • Excellence

    • Challenge and solution

    Describe the identified customer pain point? What is the business need, technological challenge or market opportunity?

    Issues with allowing to easily run code creates knowledge silos and hinders understanding. Collaboration is hard because versioning is hard. Git requires expert knowledge. Writing is cumbersome. Sharing is hard. AWS is impossible to understand. More specific tools like tableau have only limited applicability.

    Market opportunity is huge, see growth of Jupyter notebooks, data science tools.

    What is your innovation?

    Integrated system for authoring documents and running code. (and sharing (reproducing?) results?). Immutability and automatic version control enables fearless experimentation.

    What is the market's state-of-the-art? How would your innovation compare with available solutions, practices or products (e.g. performance, costs, ease-of-use, gender dimension1, climate change or environmental aspects, benefits to society)?

    Matematica, Jupyter Notebooks

    Approach

    What is unique in your approach, compared to those of other companies?
    Why now? Explain the historical evolution of your category and define recent trends that make your solution possible.
    What is the current development stage of your innovation? Refer to Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) or something analogous for non-technological innovations (see General Annex G of the Work Programme).
    Which milestones led to the current development stage (e.g. proof of concept completed, early field trials under way)? Describe the results obtained on the technological, practical and economic feasibility of the innovation.
    What are the further stages and activities needed to commercialize your innovation and which of these activities do you intend to perform in this Phase-2 project
    What are the expected outcomes of this Phase-2 project and the related success criteria?

  • Impact

    • Shouldn’t be so up in the air as “replace publishers”

    • Problems with reproducibility and collaboration in Jupyter notebooks.

    • Data Science is on the rise

    • No code / low code platform

    • Pain points for reproducibility/climate change

    • ML

    Growth of notebooks as an indicator of market demand:

    • of Jupyter notebooks on GitHub is on the rise

    • GitHub

    • Jupyter Conf

    • AirTable IFTTT

    • repl.it

    • Research about the market - a one pager on what our product is about. Or two sentence.

    • Boost productivity - GitHub isn’t enough for science and data analysis. You need code, computation environment, and narrative to live together in an integrated system.

    Entering the market

    Who are the targeted users and/or customers and why will they want to buy your product/service (unique selling point)? Are they new or already part of your customer base? What is your relation with them ( e.g. market survey, testing/feedback, letters of intent)?
    What is the market in terms of type (e.g. niche, / high volume, new/mature, growth rate), size (e.g. volume, value, geographical scope) and growth? What is your targeted market share?
    Who are your main direct and indirect competitors? (Competitors, substitutes and alternatives).
    Which are the barriers to entry? How do you intend to overcome them?

    Business model

    How does this innovation fit with your company's overall business strategy?
    Describe your value chain. Identify which of these or other stakeholders should be involved to ensure successful commercial exploitation. Define the nature of your current relation with them.
    Outline your business model, including the revenue model and your commercialization plan with an approximate time-to-market or deployment.
    Why is your model scalable? How do you intend to scale-up and reach European and/or global markets?

    Financing

    What is the company's ownership and capital structure?
    What would be the impact of your innovation on the company financials (profit/loss, turnover and cash flows), jobs and efficiency/productivity improvement in the 3 years following the launch of this Phase-2 project?
    Indicate the estimated funding requirements and the timeline to reach the commercialization stage of your innovation. How do you intend to finance the 30% co-financing rate? Outline your plans to ensure the subsequent financing of your innovation (next rounds, top-up financing, etc.).

    Intellectual Property Right (IPR) and legal framework

    Describe the legal and regulatory requirements to be fulfilled for the exploitation of your innovation and whether it is incorporated in or compliant with standards relevant to the technology
    What are your IPR assets? Describe the key knowledge items and who owns them and who else may have rights to use them; patents (applied/granted) or other ways of protection.
    What is your strategy for knowledge management and protection?
    What are your measures to ensure commercial exploitation ('freedom to operate')?

    Communication and access to research data

    How will you publicly communicate about your innovation during the period of the grant?2 Where relevant, mention measures for public/societal engagement on issues related to the project.
    If relevant, how will you manage/exploit/share the research data3 generated and/or collected during the project? What are the types of data and standards to be generated/collect? How will this data be curated and preserved and what are the costs involved? If data cannot be made available for commercial reason, explain why.
    If relevant, what are the measures to provide open access (free on-line access, such as ‘green’ or ‘gold’ model) to peer-reviewed scientific publications to result from the project?

  • Implementation

    1. Hosted (i.e. no setup)

    2. Integrated (the platform combines a scheduler, authoring environments, Code execution, an instance is provisioned for you, the runner shuts down once the task is complete)

    3. Applying functional programming concepts at the systems level that get you all these guarantees. Enables remix as a core concept, for example.

    4. Built for the web from the ground up - you can render them without running them.

    5. Built for collaboration from the ground up

    Team

    Describe your team and their achievements and experience in relation to the approach you will be taking.
    Describe the roles of the team within your project. What is the role of the company's owner(s)? What are the main strengths and weaknesses of the team?
    If your project is to be implemented by a consortium, describe how the partners complement each other.

    Work packages, deliverables, milestones, risk

    Describe the overall structure of the work plan.
    Explain the timing of the work packages and their components (include a Gantt chart or similar).
    Present a detailed work description:

    • i.List of work packages (table 3.a)

    • ii.A description of each work package (table 3.b)

    • iii.List of major deliverables (table 3.c)

    Include a list of milestones (table 3.d)
    What might go wrong? Include a table with critical risks identified and mitigating actions (table 3.e). Explain your approach to the proposed mitigation measures.

    Work package means a major sub-division of the proposed project. Deliverable means a distinct output of the project, meaningful in terms of the project's overall objective. It can be a report, a document, a technical diagram, a piece of software etc.Milestones are control points to help to chart your progress. Milestones may correspond to the completion of a key deliverable. They may also correspond to other inputs, allowing the next phase to begin, to decide on further steps or to take corrective measures.

    Resources

    What are the resources, equipment and facilities required for the project and how will you access them? Would you need additional resources for scaling-up your business? Please provide the following:

    • i.a table showing number of person months required (table 3.f)

    • ii.a table showing ‘other direct costs’ (table 3.g) for participants where those costs exceed 15% of personnel costs (according to the budget table in section 3 of the proposal administrative forms**

    See PDF

  • Company

    • 4.1 Participants (applicants)Please provide for each participant, the following:

    a description of the legal entity and its main tasks, with an explanation of how its profile matches the tasks in the proposal;
    a curriculum vitae or description of the profile of the persons, including their gender, who will be primarily responsible for carrying out the proposed activities;
    a brief description of relevant products, services (including widely used datasets or software) or other achievements (which may also include previous projects or activities connected to the subject of the proposal);
    a description of significant infrastructure and/or any major items of technical equipment relevant to the proposed work;

    4.2 Third parties involved in the project (including subcontracting and use of third party resources)Please complete, for your company, or for consortia, each participant**

    See PDF

  • Ethics and security

    • See PDF If you have entered any ethics issues in the ethical issue table in the administrative proposal forms, you must: